How Much Voter Fraud Happens in US Elections?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns election fraud. Democrats try to tell us that there is no election fraud, or fraud does not affect election results because there is not enough of it. Numbers tell a difference story. In an article published in The Daily Signal, Fred Lucas reported some numbers. 

Since late 2025, federal law enforcement has made 160 election fraud arrests and has 10 times as many investigations in motion, senior Trump administration officials said.

“We are investigating several hundred cases that are very much active right now. We are bringing several cases each week,” a Justice Department official told the Daily Signal Tuesday. “But I will say that we have thousands of cases that are in their infancy, where we are receiving public voter files.”

The Daily Signal reported on Monday that the Justice Department has brought about two dozen voter fraud cases in September so far.

Previously, the Daily Signal reported that, as of late August, the second-term Trump Justice Department charged 50 noncitizens for voter fraud in its first one and a half years, compared to 13 such cases brought in the entirely of the Biden administration.

The Justice Department is combining its own internal database and tools and distributing that information to U.S. attorneys’ offices, Homeland Security Investigations field offices, and the FBI.

“What you are seeing right now is stuff that has been in the hopper, and we have been working for a while now,” the Justice Department official said, “We think as the weeks progress, we will see those tranches, just in their infancy, start to really build and come to fruition as well.”

The administration also plans to release numbers on non-prosecutable cases, noting that more than 100,000 people have illegally registered to vote or voted, but the statute of limitations has expired for prosecution.

The uptick in arrests shows federal prosecutors are not just looking the other way on voter fraud, said Chad Ennis, vice president of the Honest Elections Project.

“The DOJ is finally putting the manpower into this. A lot of times, all you have to do is look,” Ennis told the Daily Signal. “Most of these prosecutions have been for in-person voting. In years past, most scattered prosecutions were for mail voting, or ballot harvesting operations.”

A Public Interest Legal Foundation database shows 1,376 elections ended in a tie since 1992, while another 533 were decided by a single vote in that time.

“Are thousands of fraudulent votes happening in one place? No,” Ennis said. “But local elections are more prone to fraud. It’s hard to steal a million votes. It’s not hard to steal 10 votes. Then someone has a city council to steer contracts their way, and it’s a good return on investment.

A Homeland Security Investigations official said the agency is getting leads from across the country, with 1,600 cases in place, and 160 arrests for illegal voting or illegal voter registration.